The Middle East

Yemen

State of alert

LATE last month, intercepted communications between Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as al-Qaeda’s head, and Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Yemen’s local franchise of the global terror group, suggested that a big terrorist attack was imminent. Though American officials were publicly vague about the nature of the threat, their actions indicated that Yemen was a potential target. Western embassies in Sana’a, the capital, shuttered their doors; American and British diplomats left the country. The United States launched a string of drone raids on suspected al-Qaeda targets in five Yemeni provinces. Spy planes hovered over Sana’a on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, when the attacks were expected.

Within a few weeks things seemed to have calmed down again. Embassies reopened. Local outrage at the government’s enhanced security measures somewhat subsided. Then, on August 25th, a bomb exploded under a bus carrying Yemeni air-force people to their base on the outskirts of the capital. No one officially claimed credit for the attack, which killed at least one person, but Yemeni officials said they reckoned that AQAP was responsible. On the day the bus bomb went off, a widely respected tribal leader was gunned down on a busy street in Sana’a.

The assassination was surely unconnected to al-Qaeda. It was harder to say whether the bus bombing had a link with it, but it seems unlikely to have been connected to the “state of alert” called by the Americans. Two clerics who are leading lights in AQAP made statements on the same day, focusing on Egypt and Syria rather than Yemen. It was noticed that one of them, Hareth al-Nathari, appeared to be wearing the clothes of a sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. “I’m not sure what they’re trying to say with his clothes,” remarked a young Yemeni. “Then again, have we ever really known what AQAP is trying to do?”